The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Page 7

  “Oh, my! I hope it wasn’t too embarrassing!”

  “Not embarrassing at all. It was just odd. You talked about someone named Alan.”

  Martina’s eyes dropped to her VDT screen, and she hit a couple of keys. “Well, Alan’s a common enough name—”

  “You spelled it. A-L-A-N. And you linked it with some comment about me. About my family. It made me wonder—”

  Martina made a low gurgling sound, but I took a deep breath and forced out the words I’d been avoiding for a lot of years. “My father’s name was Alan Matthews, Martina. He was a newspaper man. I wondered if you had ever worked with him.”

  Martina looked as if a load had been lifted from her shoulders. “No, Nell, I never worked with anyone whose name was Alan Matthews,” she said.

  I was relieved. Or maybe I wasn’t. Either way, I turned and moved toward my own desk.

  “Nell.” Martina’s voice was sharp. “You referred to your father in the past tense. Does that mean he’s no longer living?”

  I concentrated on keeping my voice steady. “We lost contact after he and my mother split up, Martina. I was raised by my grandparents. I don’t know anything about my father’s current life—or even if he’s still living or not.”

  Martina frowned. I would have expected her to go into one of her gushes of sweetness—“Oh, you poor thing,” and all that crap. But she didn’t. She simply frowned at her keyboard. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet, and for once she sounded sincere. “I’m sorry to hear that, Nell. If your father was a newspaper man, I know he would be very proud of your professional accomplishments.”

  I shrugged. “He could find me if he took the trouble to look. If he’s alive. About yesterday—I didn’t mean to pry, but the things you said—under the influence of blanket wash—had raised my curiosity.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know what I was raving about.”

  We both went back to work, and the newsroom had a period of calm for about an hour. Then Martina’s salesman friend Dan Smith, the one with the mohair shawl on his head, came by with Ed Brown and his clipboard. Dan stopped at Martina’s desk. She got all fluttery, and they took a twenty-minute coffee break. She slipped the white jacket off before they went downstairs, and she put it back on as soon as she got back. It seemed to have replaced the old-fashioned eyeshade and sleeve protectors as Martina’s idea of an editor’s uniform.

  Martina worked steadily, but I was aware that now and then she looked at me with troubled eyes. I’d apparently given her something to think about. Maybe she was now the one trying to figure out who Alan was.

  When the time for her dinner break came, she stood up and told Ruth she was leaving. Then she came around to my desk.

  “Is Mike bringing your dinner?”

  “No, he has a conference with his thesis adviser tonight. I was going to run down to Goldman’s. Do you want me to get you something?”

  “Oh, no! I brought my lunch.” Martina frowned. “It’s just . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she took a deep breath and went on firmly. “Nell, maybe we do need to talk.”

  “Sure. Now?”

  “No, no! Not in the newsroom.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Are you going to dinner in thirty minutes?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, meet me in the basement lounge as soon as you go down.”

  I laughed. “I thought you might want to avoid that lounge.”

  “It’s still the best place in the building for a quiet nap.” Martina leaned forward and whispered. “Or a quiet chat.”

  I stared at her, but she turned and walked away, headed toward the back stairway.

  I broke for dinner in exactly thirty minutes, and I practically ran down the stairs. I wasn’t sure Martina was going to tell me something I wanted to hear, but—I’m a real reporter, I guess, or maybe just humanly curious. I couldn’t wait to hear whatever it was.

  In fact, I was going down the back stairs so fast that on the first floor I nearly knocked J.J. Jones flat. He was coming out of the door to the basement stairs, and I swung the door open fast and right in his face. Then I nearly ran over him.

  “Careful, young lady!”

  “Sorry, J.J.”

  We dodged back and forth in the hall, dancing over a set of inky footprints some pressman had left on the tile. I felt as if I were learning to dance by following the painted feet—the way my teen magazines offered to teach the Hustle. If I stepped to my left, J.J. stepped to his right. Then we did it the other way around, with me going right and him going left. His brilliant green jacket swirled. I almost expected him to pirouette, but he didn’t. The inky footprints seemed to grow in number, as if we were being invited to dance harder.

  Finally J.J. gave an exasperated sigh and stopped dead, with his back to the wall. He waved me by, and I went past him and on toward the break room. I was surprised that J.J. hadn’t come up with some folksy saying. Something about “dance with the one that brung you” maybe.

  Martina wasn’t among the dozen or so people in the break room—most of them pressmen—so I knew she’d gone on down to the lounge. I bought some cheese crackers from the junk food machine, and I started toward the back door, headed for the basement and for the downstairs lounge by way of the spiral stairs Mike found so scary.

  Someone said my name. “Nell.”

  It was Arnie, sitting alone at a table in the smoking section, shuffling his cards. He beckoned, and I went over.

  “Got time for a game of Dirty Eight?”

  “Sorry, I promised I’d meet Martina. She probably wants to lecture me about something.”

  “Editorial problems?”

  “Thank God I’m not a real editor!”

  Arnie nodded, and I knew he understood. Jake, our managing editor, believes that no reporter really understands how a newspaper works until he or she has had to deal with editorial problems. So, after you’ve been a reporter two years, you have to do six months on the copy desk. With Martina as your supervisor. If you live through that, Jake feels, you might make a real news hound. This policy is explained to all new reporters.

  “You’re getting there,” Arnie said. “Listen, before you go to meet Martina, let me pass one idea along.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I know most of the stuff that pressman—Bob Johnson—was raving about last night was junk.”

  “Right. Mike and I are not trying to frame Bob for causing Martina’s accident.”

  “Yeah, you can ignore that part. But you might pay attention to the last thing he said.”

  I tried to remember. I must have looked blank, because Arnie went on. “He said that if it happened the way we said it did, it was no accident.”

  “You mean, somebody tried to asphyxiate Martina on purpose? That’s hard to believe.”

  “True. But the more I think about it, the more I think it was a really strange mishap.”

  “Martina’s hard to get along with, but surely no one would really try to gas her!”

  Arnie frowned. “Just be careful, Nell.”

  “Always,” I said. I gave him a casual wave, then went out the back door. I stopped on the metal grid, scanning the expanse of giant paper rolls, taking in the glaring light on the pathways and the dark and shadowy niches between the rolls and behind the equipment. As soon as my eyes had adjusted, I grabbed the handrail and started down the circular iron stairway.

  I had rounded the first curve before I saw the vivid colors of Martina’s dress, heaped up on the basement floor.

  Chapter 7

  I guess I vaulted down the rest of those stairs. One second I saw Martina beneath me, and the next I was kneeling beside her.

  And I was yelling. “Help! Call an ambulance! Help!”

  But my screams brought no reaction. No one could hear me. I was alone in the basement, and solid, soundproof metal doors were between me and the rest of humankind—the people I’d seen in the break room and any stray souls in the warehouse.

&n
bsp; Should I run for help, or should I try to help Martina myself? She was lying flat on her face, with knees drawn up, lifting her rump into the air. Her arms stuck out to the sides, and the bright flowers of her dress formed a grotesque design where they met a puddle of blood under her head and shoulders.

  I was afraid to move her, but I forced myself to feel her wrist. I couldn’t find a pulse, but that didn’t mean anything. I can never find my own pulse, much less anybody else’s. I put my head down on the floor beside her head, and I tried to see what was under here.

  There was nothing under there. Martina’s head lay flat on the concrete floor.

  Her face was gone.

  I probably screamed again. Then I was racing back up the stairs. I struggled with the heavy metal door to the break room and rushed inside. The pressroom crew was still arguing about the baseball season, and Arnie was dealing out a sol hand.

  “Arnie!” My shriek stopped all conversation. “Call an ambulance! Martina’s fallen down the stairs! I think she’s dead!”

  And I rushed back. I was still afraid to touch her, and I didn’t know anything I could do for her, but the thought of leaving her down there alone was worse than being down there with her.

  I was kneeling beside her again by the time the press crew rushed onto the metal grid and leaned over the iron railing. One or two even started down the stairs.

  “Stay up there!” I was still screaming. “Don’t come down unless you know first-aid!”

  Bob Johnson came down. “I’m the official first-aider on this shift,” he said.

  He knelt beside her, and he touched her wrist with more authority than I had used. He used his other hand to gesture toward her head and a puddle of blood.

  “I can’t feel a pulse, and she’s quit bleeding,” he said. He moved his hand to her rib cage. “No breathing. I think she’s gone.” He put his head flat on the floor and looked. “Ummm!” He sat up quickly, looking white. “There’s sure no way for an amateur to try mouth-to-mouth,” he said.

  I nodded. Martina had no mouth.

  The two of us knelt beside her in silence. The press crew was quiet, and Arnie came out and jostled his way through the group. He came down the stairs.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “It’s probably best to stay away.”

  He nodded, but he came down anyway. He looked at me, not Martina. “Are you okay?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Go upstairs.”

  I shook my head. “No. If Martina and I weren’t friends, at least we were co-workers. I’ll stay with her.”

  He touched my shoulder, then stood behind me. In less than five minutes the ambulance crew from St. Luke’s got there. The cops came, too. When the emergency people began to work, I went upstairs. Arnie came behind me, his hand on my elbow. I should have resented it, but I didn’t.

  As I reached the landing, the door from the warehouse opened, and Mike came in. That’s when I nearly collapsed. I took his hand, and I gulped furiously, but I made it without breaking into hysterical sobs, even when he put his arms around me.

  Mike and Arnie and I went into the break room and sat down. Arnie nervously lit a cigarette, even though we were in the non-smoking end of the room.

  “How’d you know what happened?” I asked Mike.

  “We’re an item at the cop shop,” he said. “The dispatcher tracked me down at home as soon as she heard you’d found a body.”

  “You’ve got to get out to Grantham State, meet with your adviser.”

  “I’ll call him.” Mike went to the phone, looked up a number in the book, and called to cancel his appointment with his thesis adviser. Ruth Borah came in, spoke to us, and ran out onto the metal grille. She came back in and said the ambulance was taking Martina away.

  Then the four of us waited. A young woman police officer came up and took a preliminary statement from Arnie and me, and told me a detective would call the next day.

  “It’s probably an accident,” she said, “but we have a routine for all unattended deaths—accidents, suicide, homicide. We fill out the same reports.”

  “I know,” I told her.

  She smiled. “Yeah, I’ve read your stories. You’ve gone over plenty of those suckers.”

  Ruth told me I could go home, but I said I thought I’d rather go back to work. I was beginning to feel like a little kid—Arnie, Mike, and Ruth were all trying to take care of me.

  “Come on, folks, I’ve seen bodies before,” I said. “Three years on the violence beat in Amity and two years here. Remember? I’ve been out on a lot of ten-sevens.”

  Ten-seven is radio code for “out of service.” Cops use it to refer to their dinner breaks—or to dead bodies.

  I did walk Mike to his truck, parked on a side street, and I even climbed inside for a good-bye snuggle. Then he drove me around the block and let me out at the Gazette Building’s main entrance. I went up the elevator and into the newsroom, trying to be calm as I spoke to the security guard and the night switchboard operator and receptionist.

  I’m not sure how good my copy editing was. The whole staff was rattled—the few who were working that evening—and there were plenty of errors to find. I did take a moment to call the Downtown Holiday Inn and leave a message for Dan Smith. He seemed to be Martina’s only friend. I hated for him to learn about her death in the morning paper. The managing editor showed up, looking serious, to call Martina’s family. He stopped by the city desk and told Ruth he’d gotten the number of a brother in California from his files.

  Arnie, as nightside police reporter, drew the job of writing up Martina’s accident.

  “A veteran employee of the Grantham Gazette was killed Tuesday evening in what appears to be an accident in the Gazette Building,” he wrote.

  Martina Gilroy, 60, chief copy editor for eight of the ten years she’d been at the Gazette, apparently fell down an iron staircase leading from the employee break room to a basement area used for paper storage. She suffered massive head injuries and was declared dead on arrival at St. Luke’s Hospital.

  An investigation, described by a Grantham Police Department spokesman as routine, is now under way.

  The stairway where the fall occurred was frequently used by Gilroy as a shortcut from the employee break room to a women’s lounge in the basement. Gilroy was found within a few minutes of her fall by a second copy editor, Nell Matthews, who immediately summoned help.

  Gilroy’s death was described by Gazette managing editor Jake Edwards as a serious loss to the newspaper.

  “Martina was a key staff member, although her duties meant that she had little contact with the public,” Edwards said. “Copy editors are the first level of supervision for reporters, and Martina herself had many years of experience as an investigative reporter. She understood the importance of detail and routine in producing accurate news stories. The Gazette newsroom won’t be the same without her.”

  No, the Gazette newsroom wouldn’t be the same. It might be better. Or at least more pleasant.

  I kept that sentiment to myself. I hadn’t liked Martina at all, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. But I’d wished her an early retirement, not a terrible accident. I wanted her out of my hair, not dead.

  “She was a pain in the rear, but nobody deserves something like that.”

  The words echoed my thoughts so clearly that I jumped. Looking up, I realized that Arnie had been standing behind me, watching as I read his article.

  “Well, I’m afraid I’ll miss her expertise,” I said. “Jake described her perfectly, of course. ‘Detail and routine.’ Picky, picky, picky. She nearly drove me crazy. From her fetish about ‘whether’ instead of ‘whether or not,’ to the way she could pull up the middle initials of thousands of people from some mental encyclopedia, to her absolute insistence that we never use the word ‘Methodist’ without ‘United’ in front—well, I hate to admit it, but she taught me a lot. But even her office routine—dinner from six-thirty to seven-fifteen exactly, sharp
ening three pencils before she sat down—even that white jacket . . .”

  I quit talking and gulped in amazement. I thought about what I’d said, and I pictured Martina’s body lying at the foot of the stairs. Then I turned to Arnie.

  “Arnie! Martina wasn’t wearing that jacket!”

  He frowned. “Wasn’t she?”

  “I’m sure she wasn’t,” I said. “I remember what a pattern the puddle of blood under her shoulders made, and how it seemed to merge with her dress. You were in the break room when she was eating. Did she have the jacket on then?”

  “Nell, I don’t remember. I didn’t look at her any more than I had to, even when she was alive.”

  He shrugged and turned to Ruth Borah. “I’m trying to get hold of the medical examiner on that Audleyville body,” he said. “Maybe they’ll have a cause of death. On the record. So that’s yet to come.” He went back to his desk.

  I ran the spell checker on Arnie’s story, then shipped it over to Ruth’s working file. Poor Martina. She’d probably be doing good to make Page 5A, the Metro News page. The only people who were going to notice she was gone were her co-workers. And we weren’t exactly going to miss her. Or her jacket.

  I copyedited a couple of stories, but my curiosity bump was itching. What had happened to Martina’s white jacket? Would she have taken that jacket off when she went down to dinner?

  If she ever took it off, she draped it over the back of her chair. It hung there all day before she came to work. I knew that because I’d seen it there. Plenty of times, when I was still a reporter, at times when Martina wasn’t on duty, I’d sat down at that desk to use her terminal—usually because the dayside city editor and I were talking about some story, and I wanted to access the article and talk at the same time.

  Once or twice I’d even knocked that white jacket onto the floor. When that happened, I was always careful to pick it up and brush it off, by golly. Martina and I had enough problems over copy. I wasn’t going to start more trouble by treating that jacket with disrespect.

  Each weekend, when Martina had her days off, she took the jacket home. And each Monday she brought it in, freshly washed and even ironed.